This is mostly an announcement, but it's also 1) my first foray into GNOME hacking and 2) only my second foray into Python, and I am hoping for a little help, or some general feedback.
Gnome has an Applications menu, and an Actions menu. I wrote a Bookmarks menu, to get to my browser's bookmarks. This idea seems to have been tried before (see RELATED WORK section below), but various similar projects appear out-of-date or incomplete.
A screenshot is worth a thousand words, and is at http://browserbookapp.sourceforge.net/screenshot-0.1.png
Source code (GPL) is at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=122136&package_id=133931&release_id=278276
CAVEATS
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Right now it only reads Firefox bookmarks. Support for Epiphany and Mozilla is planned.
HELP! (AKA GNOME API AND OTHER QUESTIONS)
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The menu (or applet?) has a border around it, but the gnome main menu applet "Applications Actions menu" does not. The screenshot shows this (see the vertical bars to the left and right of the blue "Bookmarks" menu). How do I get rid of the border?
I'm not fluent in [auto]make or RPM .spec files, and would appreciate some help. I found the pygnome-hello example and am looking at that, but it isn't a panel applet, so I am not entirely sure how to adapt it to:
1) install my .server file into the right place (/usr/lib/bonobo/server in general, but .../lib64/... on x86_64).
2) restart whatever needs to be restarted (gnome-panel?? bonobo-activation-server??) on installation for it to show up in the "Add to Applet" option in the panel context menu.
Also, any leads on writing a .spec file or packaging a python gnome-applet as an RPM? I am completely lost in figuring out what the dependencies are - I presume gnome-panel, gnome-python2 and gnome-python2-applet - but how do I find out what else (and what versions) my software depends on? And is the gnome-python / gnome-python-applet distinction a distribution-specific thing?
RELATED WORK
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An old (1999) mailing list post talks about creating a Netscape Bookmarks sub-menu of the foot menu (http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-devel-list/1999-September/msg00024.html) - Miguel de Icaza replied that "it seems a very good idea", but I don't know where it went from there. PyGnome 1.4 had a Netscape bookmarks applet (pygnome/examples/bookmarks-applet.py), but this seems to have been dropped in more recent versions of gnome-python.
Gnome Bookmarks Organizer (gnobog) at http://www.nongnu.org/gnobog/ is slightly different (it has its own frame rather than being a panel applet) and looks like it's been superseded by Firefox's Bookmarks sidebar.
The Nautilus-Menu applet (http://bitpoetry.com/programs/nautilusmenu/) and bookmark-applet (http://gnomefiles.org/app.php?soft_id=278) look pretty similar, but they provide access to GTK file-chooser bookmarks (local files), not provide access to the browser bookmarks (URLs).
cheers,
Nigel.